5 companies using blockchain to open the art industry

By Matt Hussey

The art market grew to $63.7 billion in 2018, according to an Art Basel report, but many consumers can’t afford to enter it. Artwork prices can reach into the hundreds of millions and fees can be as high as 20%.

Offering the ability to buy and sell fractions of paintings will bring a new customer base into the industry. Have you ever wanted to own part of a Van Gogh? Now you can.

Buy and sell fractional pieces of artworks using the Maecenas platform

In May, Modigliani’s Nu Couché (Sur le Côté Gauche) was sold for $157.2 million. Now, unless you happened to buy bitcoin in 2012, you probably don’t have that kind of spare change.

Maecenas wants to democratize the fine art industry, making it available to everyone. This involves selling fractions of artworks with lower fees.

Each fraction will be linked to a token, recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. This means investors can be confident that they own that fraction. The fraction will increase in price along with the value of the artwork.

Tokenisation of assets is the most prominent and exciting use case of blockchain technology, and we’re proud to be pioneers in this space. Marcelo García Casil, CEO of Maecenas

Store all ‘art and collectibles’ on the blockchain with Codex Protocol

Ever bought a watch online and wondered if it was stolen? Often there’s no easy way to check.

With a digital registry of art and collectible items, it will be possible to prove that you own an item. It will also be faster and cheaper to transfer ownership.

Together, we’ll continue to push forward in building the decentralized registry that is so strongly needed within the art and collectibles market as well as other asset classes. Mark Lurie, founder & CEO.

Create digital art and sell it on the blockchain with DADA.nyc

This is bad news for artists. When their art can be shared to millions of potential customers for free, they lose out on a lot of money. Blockchain can prevent this from happening by keeping records of sales and ensuring that the artists profits from every transaction.

DADA.nyc is an online gallery for digital art. Art can be resold on the gallery and the artist will continue to earn money per sale. This encourages a positive second hand market for digital art and enables artists to make a living.

Somehow the art world as we know it has painted itself into a corner of exclusivity that has made art unapproachable, unaffordable, and irrelevant for the vast majority of people. Blockchain can and will change things. Yehudit Mam, co-founder of DADA

Late night bidding with crypto is all the rage at R.A.R.E.

Auctions are stuffy places full of rules. Crypto breaks this wide open by letting you bid on digital art from anywhere in the world at any time.

R.A.R.E. is an online digital art marketplace with an auction that lets you bid in real-time with prices in Ethereum or in RARE tokens. This means artists have their work opened up to the whole world.

It also uses proof-of-ownership to help tackle the problem of digital theft.

At R.A.R.E. we are dedicated to adding value to artists’ lives and instilling a sense of community in the network. Our community gives us the foundation for everything we do.” Kevin Trinh, co-founder of R.A.R.E.

Keep your photos yours and monetise them online with Image Protect

A bugbear for photographers is finding their photos used in news articles and promotional pieces without a dime of compensation. It’s not easy to get them taken down either.

Image Protect is creating a registry for digital content so that artists can keep ownership over their work. This means photographers can monetize their work and stop it from being stolen.

It will also use its IPTrack internet monitoring to crawl the internet and find unlicensed uses of digital content. Image Protect will take action on behalf of its photographers and offer a way for the image to be display in a monetized way.

Within four years, Image Protect has gone from a Silicon Beach start-up to a thriving organization with 55 million images from over 450k photographers and 40+ Media agencies from across the globe. Founder and CPO, Jonathan Thomas

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